What the investigators have is a jumble of clam shells, found in the strata where Homo erectus bones have been found elsewhere. These shells have been modified — the inference is that H. erectus was living along the shore, gathering clams, and popping them open to eat.

First, evidence of tool use. Many of them have small holes, precisely gouged into the shells at a specific location, and these holes do not resemble in detail the damage done by other mollusc-eating animals. The closest thing to the kind of damage done in these shells was made by using a shark tooth (common in the area), and twisting the point against the shell.

Second, they knew something about these molluscs. The holes were punched precisely above the attachment point for the adductor muscle, the big muscle that clams use to clamp their shells shut. Experimenting with modern clams, the authors found that one small hole above that attachment would damage the adductor, so the shell would easily open. Brilliant! Now I want to go dig some clams and try it myself.

And finally, doodler. One of the shells had some remarkable markings engraved on the inside — straight lines and a rough geometric pattern. The authors are quick to say there is no reason to justify calling this art, or something of religious significance, the two usual explanations trotted out for ancient paintings. I’m going to go out on a limb here, though, and suggest that our mighty clam hunter was doodling.

So after a delicious sea food dinner, H. erectus is relaxing, taking it easy, playing with the leftovers. And just to pass the time, she takes one of her handy shark teeth and scratches a mark on the shell — and then a few more. No big deal, she’s just a big ape exploring her environment with those dexterous, clever hands, and making idle doodles to entertain herself.

Comments

I’ll go even farther out on a limb and suggest that since she clearly liked molluscs, liked expressing herself with scribbles, and because the evidence of the doodle clearly shows that her last name began with an “M”, she must have been an early Myers.

Obviously not an M. Don’t believe the dogmatic fundamentalist scientismists who say such garbage. It’s clearly a Σ which the alien (whose last name happens to start with W, btw) used as part of a calculation for the trip back to their home planet. The map showing the trajectory is adjacent to it on the clam shell, including the needed discontinuous quantum leaps in spacetime.

btw, there are some legit criticisms of this paper that weren’t touched on by PZ.

Coyne posted some of them when he ran the story.

excerpt:

Yet even if ancient humans engraved the shell, says Russell Ciochon, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, the team has not shown that H. erectus did it. Ciochon, who has spent many years working at sites in Java, agrees with criticisms that the shells have been taken out of context, because Trinil was not an occupation site where early humans actually lived. Rather, Ciochon argues, the human fossils found there (which include a skullcap widely agreed to be H. erectus and a thigh bone that could belong to either H. erectus or H. sapiens,a matter of sharp debate) were washed into the site by a powerful flood, and nothing found with them—including the shells—can be assumed to have been associated with them originally. Although the team dated four of the shells in the collection, including the engraved shell, to about 500,000 years ago using two different techniques on sediments of sand and clay found inside them, Ciochon says that those sediments could have entered the shells during the earlier flood event that created the site, and that H. sapiens still could have come along much later and performed the etching.

the fact that the shells were of similar size can be explained by human choice, or by sorting in fast moving water.

it’s a legit criticism.

I tend to think their best work was with the bore holes in the shell, looking at microfracture lines that are nothing like what you would see if something like the radula of a snail or octopus made them.

0_o
…
How do we know that the hole was used to open the clam and not to make the shell into a necklace?
Clams can be opened by hitting them as well (some animals do that). However if it was a necklace or some other ornament it would explain why the hole (presumably there for a sinew or some other string) was on the opposite side of the carved surface.

If indeed the hole was drilled to open the clam, the inference is that these hominids had not yet started controlling fire. Cooking clams opens them right up. Did 500,000 year-old hominids have “buckets” to hold clams until they ejected their sand? Perhaps the drilling also caused the clams to eject sand.

messy. tends to get sand and pieces of shell over everything.
in the end, it’s actually faster to drill a hole.

Good point. Anyway, it’s a bit surprising that we don’t have evidence of ornaments or body jewelry from that period. If birds can pretty up their nests, why wouldn’t H. erectus do that to their bodies? Seems fairly odd. Fishy, even.

Kamaka #27

If indeed the hole was drilled to open the clam, the inference is that these hominids had not yet started controlling fire.

Unlikely. There are evidence that H. erectus used fire 0.5 million years ago, there are some evidence to even earlier periods (up to 1.7 million years ago – pdf) and many claim that the evolution of jaws, brain and stomach show fire use even earlier than that.

Sometimes people do things the way they do because that’s the way they’ve always done them. It might be that nobody up to that point had put the clams in hot water before opening them and noticed that they opened when that happened. Doesn’t preclude the use of fire for cooking or otherwise that they may have used a different method.

Technologies come and go. My point is this group of hominids drilling clams *may not* have had fire technology even though fire had long since been under control by other groups. Unlikely, but quite possible.

That said, these folks may well have preferred to eat their clams raw.

It would be very interesting that H. erectus did the doodling OR the drilling to eat the clams. I am mildly amused that the zig-zag lines are similar to the first doodles attributed to H. sapiens in a cave site in South Africa. Those are about 80,000 years old, if I recall .

Or….”Jesus the Hebrew from Nazareth” (he showed up too early again, just like with the dinosaurs*)
H. Erectus watched Jesus appear, only to get trampled by a herd of Hipparion. This is the earliest known Bible fragment!

These are shells of unionids, commonly known as freshwater mussels. Anyone who wants to experiment with this clam-opening technique in the U.S. should learn to ID the common ones first. They’re at their most diverse here with nearly 300 species, and a ridiculous percentage of them are endangered. If you just want to doodle, it’s often easy to find the shells along the edges of streams and rivers.

Young H. erectus is collecting food with a more experienced companion – asks how to open the damn thing – gets handed a shark tooth – makes some ineffective scratches before being shown the correct procedure.